The Anglo-Saxons were pagans when they came to Britain, but, as time passed, they gradually converted to Christianity. Many of the customs we have in England today come from pagan festivals.
Pagans worshiped lots of different gods. Each pagan god controlled a particular part of everyday life: the family, growing crops, love, healing, wisdom, metalworking, the weather, war, day & night and so on.
GOD
GOD OF WHAT?
Balder
God of Immortality
Eostre
Goddess of Birth
Frigg
Goddess of Love
Hel
Goddess of Death
Loki
God of Cunning
Saxnot
God of the Family
Thunor
God of Thunder
Tiw
God of War
Wade
God of the Sea
Wayland
God of Metalworking
Woden
Chief God
Religion was a means of ensuring success in material things. For example, you might pray to a particular goddess for a successful harvest, or for victory in battle.
Days of the Week Certain days of the week are named after early Saxon Gods.
Monandæg ( Moon's day - the day of the moon ), Tiwesdæg ( Tiw's-day - the day of the Scandinavian sky god Tiw,Tiu or Tig), Wodnesdæg ( Woden's day - the day of the god Woden (Othin) ), Ðunresdæg ( Thor's Day - the day of the god Ðunor or Thunor ), Frigedæg ( Freyja's day - the day of the goddess Freyja or Frigg, wife to Woden), Sæternesdæg ( Saturn's day - the day of the Roman god Saturn, whose festival "Saturnalia," with its exchange of gifts, has been incorporated into our celebration of Christmas.), Sunnandæg ( Sun's day - the day of the sun ).
From Pagan to Christianity About 1400 years ago, the Pope in Rome sent a missionary to England to persuade the Anglo-Saxons to become Christians.
The leader of the Christian Church was the Pope, who lived in Rome. The Pope sent a monk called Augustine to England. Augustine landed in the south and converted the first King Ethelbert of Kent, and then the people living there. The Pope made Augustine a Bishop and Ethelbert allowed him to build a church in Canterbury.
Christianity then spread to other parts of Britain. The pope gave orders that pagan temples should be converted into Christian ones and that pagan celebrations should also be made into Christian ones.
Churches, usually built of wood, were built in Saxon villages all over Britain.
Anglo-Saxon Poetry (or Old English Poetry) encompasses verse written during the 600-year Anglo-Saxon period of British history, from the mid-fifth century to the Norman Conquest of 1066. Almost all of the literature of this period was orally transmitted, and almost all poems were intended for oral performance. As a result of this, Anglo-Saxon poetry tends to be highly rhythmical, much like other forms of verse that emerged from oral traditions. However, Anglo-Saxon poetry does not create rhythm through the techniques of meter and rhyme, derived from Latin poetry, that are utilized by most other Western European languages. Instead, Anglo-Saxon poetry creates rhythm through a unique system of alliteration. Syllables are not counted as they are in traditional European meters, but instead the length of the line is determined by a pattern of stressed syllables that begin with the same consonant cluster. The result of this style of poetry is a harsher, more guttural sound and a rhythm that sounds more like a chant than a traditional song.
Although most Anglo-Saxon poetry was never written down and as such is lost to us, it was clearly a thriving literary language, and there are extant works in a wide variety of genres including epic poetry, Bible translations, historical chronicles, riddles, and short lyrics. Some of the most important works from this period include the epic Beowulf, Caedmon's hymn, Bede's Death Song, and the wisdom poetry found in the Exeter Book such as The Seafarer, and The Wanderer.
The Anglo-Saxons were Germanic barbarians who invaded Britain and took over large parts of the island in the centuries following the withdrawal of the Roman Empire. They were initially less gentrified than other post-Roman barbarian groups such as the Franks or Ostrogoths because they had less contact with Mediterranean civilization.
The Anglo-Saxons were originally pagan in religion. The main group, from northwestern Germany and Denmark, was divided into Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. tribal affiliations were loose and the original invaders included people from other Germanic groups as well.
Although some of the early Anglo-Saxon invaders had Celtic-influenced names, such as Cedric, the founder of the house of Wessex, the Anglo-Saxons had a pronounced awareness of them-selves as different from the peoples already inhabiting Britain. Their takeover led to the integration of Britain into a Germanic world. Unlike other groups such as the Franks they did not adopt the of the conquered Celtic and Roman peoples, but continued speaking a Germanic dialect.
The early Anglo-Saxons highly valued courage and skill in battle, as reflected in the most significant surviving Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf. Their pagan religion was marked by a strong sense of fatalism and doom, but also by belief in the power of humans to manipulate super-natural forces through spells and charms. They shared a pantheon with other Germanic peoples, and many Anglo-Saxon royal houses boasted descent from Woden, chief of the Gods. Their religion was not oriented to an afterlife, although they may have believed in one.
The Anglo-Saxons strongly valued familial ties—the kinless man was an object of pity. If an Anglo-Saxon was killed, it was the duty of his or her family to attain vengeance or a monetary payment, weregild, from the killer. Anglo-Saxon kinship practices differed from those of the Christian British, adding to the difficulty of the assimilation of the two groups. For example, British Christians were horrified by the fact that the Anglo-Saxons allowed a man to marry his stepmother on his father’s death. Anglo-Saxons also had relatively easy divorce customs.
The cultural differences between the Britons and the Anglo-Saxons were particularly strong in the field of religion, as British Christians despised Anglo-Saxon paganism. The Anglo-Saxons reciprocated this dislike and did not assimilate as did continental Germanic groups. The extent to which the Anglo-Saxons simply displaced the British as opposed to the British assimilating to AngloSaxon culture remains a topic of debate among historians and archeologists of post-Roman Britain.
The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity owed more to missionary efforts from Ireland and Rome than it did to the indigenous British Church. Paganism held out longest among the common people and in the extreme south, in Sussex and the Isle of Wight.
Some Anglo-Saxons were not converted until the middle of the eighth century. Some peculiar relics of paganism held out for centuries. For example Christian Anglo-Saxon kings continue to trace their descent from Woden long afterconversion. The church waged a constant struggle against such surviving pagan Anglo-Saxon customs as men marrying their widowed stepmothers. Reconciling Irish and Roman influences was also a challenge, fought out largely on the question of the different Irish and Roman methods of calculating the date of Easter. Not until the Synod of Whitby in 664 did the Anglo-Saxon church firmly commit to the Roman obedience.
Conversion led to the opening of Anglo-Saxon England, until then a rather isolated culture, to a variety of foreign influences, particularly emanating from France and the Mediterranean. The leader of the missionary effort sent by Rome to Kent to begin the conversion, Augustine, was an , and the most important archbishop of Canterbury in the following decades, Theodore, was a Greek from Cilicia in Asia Minor. Pilgrimages were also important in exposing Anglo-Saxons to more developed cultures.
The first recorded visit of an Anglo-Saxon to Rome occurred in 653 and was followed by thousands of others over the centuries. Since pilgrims needed to travel through France to get to Italy and other Mediterranean pilgrimage sites, pilgrimage also strengthened ties between Gaul and Britain.
Anglo-Saxon churchmen found out about innovations or practices in other places, such as glass windows in churches, and came back to England eager to try them out. Despite these influences, Anglo-Saxon Christianity also drew from Germanic culture.
Like other Germanic peoples the Anglo-Saxons tended to view the Bible and the life of Christ through the lens of the heroic epic. Christ was portrayed as an epic hero, as in one of the greatest Anglo-Saxon religious poems, The Dream of the Rood. The Dream of the Rood recounts the Crucifixion from the seldom-used point of view of the cross itself, and represents Christ as a young hero and the leader of a group of followers resembling a Germanic war band.
Another remarkable example of the blending of Germanic and Christian traditions is the longest surviving Anglo-Saxon poem, the epic Beowulf. Telling of a pagan hero in a pagan society, the epic is written from an explicitly Christian point of view and incorporates influences from the ancient Roman epic, Virgil’s Aeneid.
As the Anglo-Saxon Church moved away from dependence on outside forces, Irish or Roman, in the seventh and eighth centuries, the Christian Anglo-Saxon kingdoms produced their own saints, mostly from the upper . Anglo-Saxon saints such as Cuthbert (d. 687), a monk and hermit particularly popular in the north of England, attracted growing cults.
The highest point of Anglo-Saxon Christian culture was the Northumbrian Renaissance, an astonishing flowering of culture and thought in a poor borderland society. Northumbria was a kingdom in the north of the area of Anglo-Saxon settlement, an economically backward and primitive society even compared to the rest of early medieval Europe. It was also a place where Continental and Irish met.
The Northumbrian Renaissance was based in monasteries, and its most important representative was the monk Bede, a historian, chronographer, and hagiographer. Bede’s Ecclesiastical of the People is the most important source for early Anglo-Saxon history. Another Northumbrian was Caedmon, the first Anglo-Saxon Christian religious poet whose works survive.
Northumbria also displayed a rich body of Christian , incorporating Anglo-Saxon and Celtic artistic influences, and some from foreign countries as far away as the Byzantine empire. An enormous amount of monastic labor went into the production of manuscripts.
Despite the importance of Northumbrian Renaissance, Northumbria was not the only place where Christian culture reached a high point. Another area was the West Country, where the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex encroached on the British territories of Devon and Cornwall. Curiously, Kent, still headquarters of the archbishop of Canterbury who claimed primacy over all the “English,” became a cultural backwater after the death of Archbishop Theodore in 690.
The influence of Anglo-Saxon Christianity and the Northumbrian Renaissance spread to continental Europe. Anglo-Saxons, in alliance with the papacy, were concerned to spread the Christian method to culturally related peoples in Germany.
The principal embodiment of this effort was the missionary Wynfrith, also known as St. Boniface (680–754), who was born in Wessex. His religious efforts began with assisting a Northumbrian missionary in an unsuccessful mission to the Frisians. He then went to Rome to receive authority from the pope.
Boniface made many missionary journeys into Germany, where he became known for converting large of Germans, and for a physical, confrontational missionary style that included chopping down the sacred trees that were a feature of Germanic paganism. Many English people followed Boniface to Germany, where they exerted a strong influence on the development of German Christianity.
Boniface was also responsible for a reorganization of the Frankish Church to bring it more firmly under papal control. On another journey to Frisia angry pagans killed him. Anglo-Saxons, along with other people from the British Isles, were also prominent in the circle of learned men at the court of Charlemagne. The leading scholar at Charlemagne’s court, Alcuin of York, was a Northumbrian.
This high point of Anglo-Saxon Christian culture was terminated by the series of Viking raids and invasions beginning in the late eighth century. Unlike Christian Anglo-Saxon warriors, who usually respected monasteries, the pagan Vikings saw them as rich repositories of treasure, and monastic life virtually disappeared from the areas under Scandinavian control.
By the ninth century the leader of the English resurgence, King Alfred the Great of Wessex, lamented the passing of the golden age of English Christianity, claiming that there was hardly any one in England who could understand the Latin of the mass . Alfred, an unusually learned king who had visited the European continent, made various attempts to restore English monasticism and learned culture.
He gathered in his court scholars from throughout the British Isles and the continent, as well as writing his own translations, such as that of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. Alfred also sponsored the translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History and other works from Latin into Anglo-Saxon. The period also saw the beginnings of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a record of current events kept in Anglo-Saxon, eventually at monasteries.
Like the political unification of England by Alfred’s descendants, the creation of this body of Anglo-Saxon literature contributed to the creation of a common Anglo-Saxon or English identity. There was very little parallel for this elsewhere in Christian Europe at the time, when learned writing was almost entirely restricted to Latin. Alfred’s patronage of men of letters was also important for the creation of his personal legend.
The unification of England did not end the Scandinavian impact on English culture, which revived with the conquest of England by the Danish king Canute in the 11th century. Canute, a Christian, respected the church and English institutions, and his reign was not destructive as the early Viking conquests had been. Scandinavian influence was particularly marked on the English language.
Since it was already similar to the Scandinavian tongues, Anglo-Saxon or Old English adopted loanwords much more easily than did Celtic languages such as Irish. Since it was necessary to use English as a means of between people speaking different Germanic tongues, many complex features of the language were lost or simplified. English would make less use of gender and case endings than other Germanic or European languages.
Although Alfred had hoped to revive English monasticism, the true recreation of monastic communities would only occur in the 940s, with royal patronage and under the leadership of Dunstan, a man of royal descent who became archbishop of Canterbury and a saint.
The English monastic revival was associated with the revival of Benedictine monasticism on the Continent, and the new monasteries followed the of St. Benedict. Monasteries dominated the church in the united Anglo-Saxon kingdom, with most bishops coming from monastic backgrounds and often serving as royal advisors.
The church generally prospered under the Eglish kings—large cathedrals were built or rebuilt after the damage of the Scandinavian invasions. The copying and illumination of manuscripts was also revived, and reached a high degree of artistic excellence in Winchester. Continental influences preceded the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. The penultimate Anglo-Saxon king, Edward the Confessor, who had spent many years in France, built Westminster Abbey in a Norman Romanesque style.
Although Anglo-Saxon culture was displaced from its position of supremacy after the Norman Conquest of 1066, it did not disappear. At least one version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle continued to be compiled for nearly a century, and Anglo-Saxon poetry continued to be composed.
It is important to understand past literary accomplishments in order to appreciate current trends in literature. It enables us to comprehend what life was like in long-ago eras. The oral tradition has also given us a glimpses of long-dead societies. One example that had a strong oral story-telling culture was the Anglo-Saxons. Fortunately, there are also some surviving written works from that era.
The Anglo-Saxons were prominent in the early Middle Ages, stretching from the first century up to the Renaissance, which began around the 14th century. The Anglo-Saxons invaded what is current-day England around the year 450, and were the dominant group until the Norman invasion in 1066. The group consisted of three Germanic tribes: the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. The Anglo-Saxon people pushed the native Britons to the region now known as Wales.
Over the next few centuries, the Anglo-Saxons were the dominant culture. However, there were many changes in society, which affected the literature. For example, the Anglo-Saxon people spoke in what is now called Old English, which is a combination of the native Briton's language and the Germanic tribal tongue they brought with them. Christianity was the religion of the Britons, and at the start of the Anglo-Saxon invasion it was suppressed. But, over the following years, these Germanic tribes converted to it. Thus, Christian ideals become popular in Anglo-Saxon literature.
The Anglo-Saxon society continued to grow over the following centuries, absorbing other cultures and rebuffing other Germanic invaders. The history of these people is reflected in the rich literature of that era.
The Anglo-Saxon invaders brought with them a tradition of oral poetry, but it was Christianity that brought the written word to the them. For the most part, only churchmen were literate and spent much time copying manuscripts. Thus, we see plenty of religious topics in the written works of that era.
Let's look at some of the more prominent traits of Old English poetry. One comes from the original Germanic tribes, which valued heroic poetry. It honored brave feats and specific codes of conduct. This type of poetry also emphasized strong kinship, with a generosity to not just blood relatives, but to all people in the tribe. The king must follow a code of royal generosity, rewarding his faithful followers. In addition, the king's subjects must follow a code of blood vengeance, fighting to the death for their king, and avenging him if he is slain (or any kinsman for that matter). To fail to do so is to suffer endless shame.
In Anglo-Saxon England, boasting was a common practice, and works of literature from this period, such as the epic tale “Beowulf,” are full of boast poems. Boasts were speeches that told of a hero’s adventures and accomplishments, and the Anglo-Saxons took these proclamations seriously, expecting the hero to live up to his declarations. Even if you didn't fight the monster Grendel, you can write about your own achievements in a boast poem modeled after the Anglo-Saxon style.
Look examples
Before you sit down to write your own boast poem, examine a few examples to identify characteristics of the style. In “Beowulf,” for example, the hero announces: “When it comes to fighting, I count myself / as dangerous any day as Grendel. / So it won’t be a cutting edge I’ll wield / to mow him down, easily as I might.” In a more modern example, Faramir from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Return of the King” introduces Aragorn in a boast: “Here is Aragorn son of Arathorn, chieftain of the Dúnedain of Arnor, Captain of the Host of the West, bearer of the Star of the North, wielder of the Sword Reforged, victorious in battle, whose hands bring healing, the Elfstone, Elessar of the line of Valandil, Isildur's son, Elendil's son of Númenor." Notice these examples indicate the victories or qualities of a hero. The Tolkien example begins by introducing the hero’s lineage, a common practice in Anglo-Saxon boasts.
Create an Outline
Write down a list of at least five of your personal accomplishments. These achievements can be academic awards, sports victories or special talents. Many boast poems also include goals you have for the future, so write down one or two things you want to do. Also make notes about your genealogy, as your boast poem should include information about your parents or where you were born. When you make your list, put your humility aside; boast poems are often exaggerated and are meant to state how great and special you are.
Exploring Anglo-Saxon Style
To write a boast poem, you must consider some stylistic norms. Anglo-Saxon poetry is written in alliterative verse, meaning there is repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words. Look at your list of achievements or genealogy and come up with alliterative phrases, such as “super soccer star.” You should also include at least three original kennings, which are phrases that substitute for a noun. For example, instead of writing “piano,” try the kenning “twinkling ivories.”
The Final Touches
Use the elements from your outline and Anglo-Saxon style ideas to write your boast poem. Begin by introducing yourself, telling your audience who you are the son or daughter of and where you come from. Write about your accomplishments, and make them sound like the grandest things anyone has ever done. Use words like “glory” and “victory” to highlight your achievements. Brag about the one or two goals you wrote for your future, telling the audience you are sure to make those goals with little effort. After you write your draft, divide it into about 15 to 20 lines. There should be caesuras in nearly every line, meaning there’s a pause in the middle of the line. Check to make sure you include plenty of alliteration and kennings, and ensure the ends of lines do not rhyme. To make your boast poem complete, perform it for the rest of your class.
Britain, but, as time passed, they gradually converted to Christianity. Many of the customs we have in 
England today come from pagan festivals.
